Machine-Processable Semantic Description For Resource Management

ABSTRACT

A method and associated apparatus is provided for generating a machine-processable semantic description of a first manageable resource of an application domain. In accordance with an embodiment of the invention, the first manageable resource is characterized by a set of aspects. Accordingly, an ontology is provided for the application domain that provides a terminology and rules for describing the set of aspects of the first manageable resources of the application domain in a semantic way. The semantic description of the first manageable resource is then generated compliant to the terminology and the rules of the ontology to describe semantically the set of aspects.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of the Invention

The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus forgenerating machine-processable semantics used for resource management ofapplication domains.

2. Description of Background

The term application domain is used in the context of this document inorder to refer to an application landscape management domain. Anapplication landscape management domain can be regarded as an entitythrough which on-demand services of an on-demand information technology(IT) infrastructure are provided to one or more client systems that makeuse of these services.

On-demand services are provided by a technology called on-demandcomputing or utility computing, also known as cloud computing. Utilitycomputing relates to the provision of computing resources, such ascomputation and storage, as a metered service to clients similar to aphysical public utility such as for example water or natural gas.Utility computing provides the advantage of a low or no initial cost toacquire hardware. Instead, computational resources are essentiallyrented. Customers with very large computations or a sudden peak indemand can also avoid the delays that would result from physicallyacquiring and assembling a large number of computers.

Conventional internet hosting services have the capability to quicklyarrange for the rental of individual servers, for example to provide abank of web servers to accommodate a sudden surge in traffic to a website.

“Utility computing” usually envisions some form of virtualization sothat the amount of storage or computing power available is considerablylarger than that of a single time-sharing computer. Multiple servers areused on the “back end” to make this possible. This might be a dedicatedcomputer cluster specifically built for the purpose of being rented out,or even an under-utilized supercomputer. The technique of running asingle calculation on multiple computers is known as distributedcomputing.

The term “grid computing” is often used to describe a particular form ofdistributed computing, where the supporting nodes are geographicallydistributed or across administrative domains. To provide utilitycomputing services, a company can “bundle” the resources of members ofthe public for sale, who might be paid with a portion of the revenuefrom clients.

Today's IT infrastructure resources are composed of a large number ofheterogeneous, distributed resources. The key to build on-demand ITinfrastructures from the heterogeneous and distributed resources is toprovide means for managing these resources through a common, standardsbased interoperability between resources.

The Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) introduces a technology toencapsulate each kind of resources behind web services interfaces. WSRFconcentrates on the stateful characteristics of IT resources, forexample the CPU temperature of a computer system. The states ofresources are referred to as so-called resource properties. The sum ofall resource properties for a specific resource is contained in theresource properties document which is a virtual XML document. WSRFdefines a WS-resource as a stateful web service that is associated witha resource properties document describing its state. Resource propertiesand the whole resource properties document can be retrieved by standardweb service calls defined by WSRF.

The web services stack includes the specification ‘web servicesaddressing’ (WS-Addressing). It introduces the concept of endpointreference (EPR) in order to normalize the addressing informationtypically provided by transport protocols and messaging systems. An EPRis an XML fragment that conveys the information that is needed toaddress a web service endpoint.

Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) is a standard on top of WSRFthat consists of two parts: a first part relates to the so-calledManagement using Web Services (MuWS) which is used to address basicmechanisms and message exchange patterns for managing WS-resources usingweb services as a communication protocol. It also defines relationshipsbetween WS-resources as a special kind of resource property. The secondpart relates to the so-called management of web services (MoWS) whichdeals with the management of web services itself that representWS-resources. It can be viewed as both, an implementation and anextension of MuWS.

The core concept of WSDM is the so-called manageable resource (MR). Amanageable resource is a WSRF WS-resource that offers a plurality ofcapabilities standardized within the WSDM specification. A manageableresource has three important documents associated with it. A WSDLdocument describes the manageable resource as a web service with aninterface. The acronym WSDL refers to the web service definitionlanguage. Further, an XML schema document describes the structure of theresource properties document. Finally, the resource properties documentitself describes the current state of the manageable resource in termsof values of the resource properties. A so-called manageability consumercan access the manageable resource using the predefined message exchangepatterns that are defined as part of the specification of thecapabilities. WSDM however only defines the interaction protocols withmanageable resources. It does not define any standards for theimplementation of manageable resources and the corresponding runtimerequirements.

WS-Management describes a general SOAP-based protocol for managingsystems like computer systems, devices, applications and othermanageable entities. WS-management identifies a core set of web servicesspecifications, usage requirements and a common set of operations thatare central to all systems management. WS-management includesspecifications for discovery and grouping of resources, setting andgetting of properties, notification, and execution of specificmanagement methods. In particular, it defines and recommends minimalimplementation requirements for conformant web services implementations.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a standard for symbolicknowledge representation in the semantic web. It is a framework forrepresenting information about resources. Information is expressed atlowest granularity in form of RDF statements with a subject, apredicate, and an object. The three parts of the RDF statement are URIreferences (URIrefs) a special kind of URI with optional fragmentidentifiers that allow addressing instances within a base URI. Using URIreferences for subject, predicate, and partly object of statements, RDFsupports the use of shared vocabularies for describing resources.Predicates and resources are defined in shared vocabularies andreferenced in URIrefs of RDF statements. RDF is based on the graphicalRDF graph model which defines an RDF graph as a collection of RDFstatements. There are several representation formats for RDF graphs.RDF/XML provides syntax to serialize RDF graphs as XML documents. Itcomprises a predefined vocabulary that is used to render RDF graphs inXML.

RDF comes along only with a rudimentary vocabulary. The domain-specificvocabulary used to describe resources of an application domain isintended to be declared somewhere outside of RDF and then referencedfrom the RDF statements. One aspect of such ontology is to provide adomain-specific vocabulary. It provides terms in which resources aredescribed and constitutes context that adds semantics to thedescriptions. An ontology is a hierarchical and related structure ofconcepts that can be identified in a domain together with additionalinformation that nearer describes the concepts and how they are relatedto each other. The OWL Web ontology Language, for which the recursiveacronym OWL is used, offers a vocabulary that builds upon RDF and RDFSchema and thus provides means to model sophisticated ontology's as RDFgraphs.

WSRF and WSDM, the established technologies for defining andimplementing manageable resources, operate on a syntactical level. Theresource properties and relationships of a manageable resource arespecified as XML elements in an XML schema document. The resourceproperties document describing the current state of the manageableresource is an XML document. It provides access to the resourceproperties on a syntactical level. Resource properties are XML elementsthat can be accessed through the names and that contain XML fragments orliteral data such as values. The manageable resources operations aredescribed in the WSDL document either on a syntactical level of input-or output-messages. No assertions about their semantics are madeexplicit except for their naming and documentation. This kind ofinformation is not accessible for machines, for example formanageability consumers of the application domain.

The mentioned aspects of manageable resources, namely resourceproperties, relationships, their values and operations, are describedonly syntactically. No assertions about their semantics are made. Otheraspects of manageable resources like the description of manageableresources itself containing entities are not formalized at all. Thisresults in a lack of possibilities how client systems such as the abovementioned manageability consumer can access and manipulate manageableresources. Further, applications executed on the clients have noexplicit domain model available that gives a description of themanageable resources of the application domain. Applications are onlydealing with syntactical constructs and have to implicitly assume thesemantics. They access resource properties by their names and getreturned XML elements as values, process literal data, construct XMLdocuments as messages and forward them to manageable resourcesoperations. Consequently, it is desirable to have a method and apparatusthat can describe at least one or more aspects of the manageableresources semantically.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The shortcomings of the prior art are overcome and additional advantagesare provided through the provision of method and apparatus forgenerating a machine-processable semantic description of a firstmanageable resource of an application domain. In accordance with anembodiment of the invention, the first manageable resource ischaracterized by a set of aspects. Accordingly, an ontology is providedfor the application domain that provides a terminology and rules fordescribing the set of aspects of the first manageable resources of theapplication domain in a semantic way. The semantic description of thefirst manageable resource is then generated compliant to the terminologyand the rules of the ontology to describe semantically the set ofaspects.

In accordance with another embodiment of the invention, the firstmanageable resource is hosted by a data processing system of theapplication domain. The data processing system is linked with a clientof the application domain. The semantic description is generated by thefirst manageable resource in response to the reception of a request fromthe client. The semantic description is then sent from the dataprocessing system to the client.

In accordance with yet another embodiment of the invention, the firstmanageable resource is adapted to generate the semantic description inresponse to a client's request compliant to the terminology of theontology. The ontology is thus known to the first manageable resource.The first manageable resource can be regarded as a computer programproduct hosted by the data processing system. The first manageableresource is then programmed to make use of the ontology for thegeneration of the semantic information. The ontology might for examplebe implicitly hard-coded in the program code of the first manageableresource by the programmer of the first manageable resource. The firstmanageable resource generates a semantic description by usage of theontology's terminology in response to the reception of a request fromthe client. In one embodiment, the client has a knowledge base and areasoner and stores the received semantic description and scans thesemantic description for import statements. In an alternate embodiment,the client receives semantic information about the set of aspects of thefirst manageable resource and generates the semantic description of thefirst manageable resource by itself. In one embodiment, the client canstore the generated semantic description in its knowledge base and scansthe semantic description for OWL import statements. The clientfurthermore employs its reasoner for further processing of the semanticinformation in the knowledge base.

Additional features and advantages are realized through the techniquesof the present invention. Other embodiments and aspects of the inventionare described in detail herein and are considered a part of the claimedinvention. For a better understanding of the invention with advantagesand features, refer to the description and to the drawings.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The subject matter which is regarded as the invention is particularlypointed out and distinctly claimed in the claims at the conclusion ofthe specification. The foregoing and other objects, features, andadvantages of the invention are apparent from the following detaileddescription taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings inwhich:

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an application domain;

FIG. 2 is a flow diagram illustrating steps performed by a method inaccordance with the invention;

FIG. 3 is a block diagram of another application domain;

FIG. 4 is a block diagram of a further application domain; and

FIG. 5 is a flow diagram illustrating steps performed by an alternativemethod in accordance with the invention.

DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an application domain 100. The applicationdomain 100 comprises a client 102, a data processing system 104, and anIT infrastructure 106. The client 102 can be regarded as a dataprocessing system which has a microprocessor 108 and storage 110. Themicroprocessor 108 executes an operating system 112 which is permanentlystored on the storage 110 and loaded for execution into themicroprocessor 108. The operating system 112 host a computer programproduct 140 which can be regarded as client application program and aknowledge base 142 as well as a reasoner 144. The computer programproduct 140, the knowledge base 142 as well as the reasoner 144 areprograms, whereby the corresponding codes are stored on the storage 110and loaded for execution into the microprocessor 108.

The data processing system 104 can also be regarded as a computer systemand has a microprocessor 114 and storage 116, whereby the microprocessor114 executes an operating system 118, which is loaded for execution fromthe storage 116 into the microprocessor 114. In view of the client 102,the data processing system 104 can be regarded as a server system. TheIT infrastructure 106 can be regarded as a data processing system or anetwork interconnecting a plurality of data processing systems and thathost one or more resources like devices, services, storage, and so on,such as resource 120. The client 102, the data processing system 104,and the IT infrastructure 106 are connected over network connections,such as network connection 122 and 124.

The resource 120 is a real resource by which a service or afunctionality can be provided to, for example, the client 102. Theresource 120 can however not be accessed directly by the client 102. Theoperating system 118 hosts a manageable resource 126 associated with theresource 120 which provides a web service through which the client 102can make use of the underlying resource 120 in a standardized way. Themanageable resource 126 can be regarded as an abstraction of theunderlying resource 120.

The operating system 118 provides also an ontology 128 which is forexample provided in form of OWL. One aspect of the ontology 128 is thatit provides a terminology 130 which is specific to the applicationdomain 100. The terminology 130 therefore provides means to describesemantically the resources and to constitute context that adds semanticsto the description of the resources. The ontology 128 therefore is ahierarchical and related structure of concepts that can be identified inthe application domain together with additional information that nearerdescribe the concepts and how they are related to each other. Inparticular, all identified concepts of the application domain 100 arereflected in OWL classes. The OWL classes as well as the inter-relationsare further described in the ontology using OWL constructs like OWLproperties or additional technologies like rules.

The current state of the application domain 100 is therefore furtherdescribed in an RDF graph. It contains RDF statements that describe theresources in the domain as instances of the ontology classes. Theterminology 130 of the ontology 128 provides the vocabulary to expressthe instance assertions in RDF. The ontology is the context for the RDFgraph that is necessary to add semantics or meaning to the statements.As an OWL ontology is serialized in RDF, together with the RDF graphdescribing the instance, it comprises a complete seamless semanticdescription of the domain's current state.

Another aspect of the ontology 128 is that it provides rules 138. Therules 138 provide instructions how to interfere on and how to processRDF statements based in the ontology. Reasoning thus allows logicalaccess to and processing of the information offered in the RDF graph onthe basis of the rules 138.

The manageable resource 126 is further characterized by a set of aspects132 that provide a description of the properties of the manageableresource 126 as well as a specification of the current state of themanageable resource 126. The client 102 might be interested in gettingsemantic information about the manageable resource 126. The clienttherefore sends a request 134 via the network connection 122 to the dataprocessing system 104. The request 134 is used to request for a semanticdescription 136 of the manageable resource 126. In response to thereception of the request 134, the manageable resource 126 generates thesemantic description 136 which is compliant to the terminology 130 ofthe ontology 128 and which describes semantically the set of aspects132.

The manageable resource 126 is therefore programmed in a way so that itgenerates a semantic description compliant to the ontology 128. Theontology's terminology 130 is implicitly assumed within the computercode of the manageable resource 126.

The semantic description 136 is sent to the client 102. The semanticdescription 136 comprises in particular semantic information about theset of aspects 132 that reflects the properties and the current state ofthe manageable resource 126. The client therefore receives a semanticdescription of the web service implemented via the manageable resource126.

The computer program product 140 is further adapted to search thesemantic description 136 for OWL import statements. The RDF graphcomprised in the semantic description 136 is formally realized as an ownOWL ontology. This allows OWL import statements that reference theunderlying ontology 128 which provides the context. Each found part ofthe ontology that is not already loaded in the knowledge base 142 isretrieved by the client 102 from the ontology 128. This could berealized through a message exchange pattern of a HTTP GET request sentby the client 102 to the system 104 and a corresponding HTTP GETresponse sent from the data processing system to the client 102.Alternatively, the ontology 128 could be provided by a Web service.Here, the ontology would be retrieved with a Web service/SOAP call.

Finally, the semantically aware client 102 stores the retrieved parts ofthe ontology in the knowledge base 142 and invokes the reasoner 144 toperform on the basis of the rules 138 inference on and processing of theknowledge in the knowledge base.

FIG. 2 shows a flow diagram illustrating basic steps performed by amethod of generating a machine-processable semantic description of amanageable resource of an application domain in accordance with theinvention. According to step 200, a client requests a semanticdescription from a manageable resource. The manageable resourcecomprises an ontology of the application domain in a hard-coded form andis therefore able to generate the semantic description in form of an RDFgraph in which aspects of the manageable resource are describedsemantically and comply with the ontology. The semantic description isthen according to step 202 sent to the client. According to step 204,the client receives the RDF graph and searches it for unsatisfied OWLimport statements. The client accesses then the ontology of theapplication domain which might be provided for example by an ontologyservice and retrieves the missing parts of the ontology that relate tothe unsatisfied OWL import statements.

FIG. 3 shows a block diagram of an application domain 300 comprising aclient 302 and a data processing system 304. The client 302 comprises amicroprocessor 306 and storage 308 and the data processing system 304comprises a microprocessor 310 and storage 312. The client'smicroprocessor 306 executes an operating system 314 which is permanentlystored on the storage 308 and loaded for execution into themicroprocessor 306. The operating system 314 further hosts a knowledgebase 316, a computer program product 318, and a reasoner 319. Theknowledge base 316, the computer program product 318, and the reasoner319 are computer programs, whereby the corresponding program codes arepermanently stored in storage 308. Moreover, the knowledge base 316 canbe regarded as a database system which is adapted to maintain andcontrol data stored in the knowledge base 316.

The microprocessor 310 of the data processing system 304 executes acomputer program product which corresponds to a manageable resource 320that is associated with an underlying resource that is hosted by an ITinfrastructure that is, for simplicity reasons, not shown in FIG. 3. Themicroprocessor 310 further executes an ontology service 322 whichprovides a terminology 324 for describing in a semantic way concepts andcharacteristics of the domain 300. The ontology 322 furthermorecomprises rules 325 used to interfere on and process semanticinformation that is compliant with the ontology.

The manageable resource 320 is associated with three documents. Themanageable resource 320 is associated with a WSDL document 326 which isused to describe the manageable resource 320 as a web service with aninterface. An XML schema document 328 describes the structure of aresource properties document 330.

The client 302 employs the knowledge base 316 to store domain specificinformation in form of RDF statements 334. The RDF statements 334 arethe building blocks of RDF graphs which are collections of statementsthat form an ontology or describe in the context of this documentmanageable resources. Some of the RDF statements 334 thus relate tomanageable resources which semantically describe them as instances ofthe corresponding classes of the ontology as provided by the ontologyservice 322. In this way, all information about the domain 300, itsmodel and its current state, is represented seamlessly at the database316 and thus at a single point which is accessible by the client 302.

The reasoner 319 provides means to interfere and to process theinformation stored in the database. This enables a thinner, moreflexible application that achieves a higher degree of automation. Inorder to ensure that the RDF graphs of a manageable resource is alwaysup to date and is representing the current state of the manageableresource, the RDF graph of a manageable resource is requested whenrequired by the client. Thus, the computer program product 318 of theclient 302 might request the resource properties document from themanageable resource 320 via a request.

A semantic description 332 in form of an RDF graph is then generated aspart of the resource properties document 330 in response to thereception of the request. The semantic description 332 comprised in theresource properties document 330 is thereby generated by describingaspects of the manageable resource in a semantic way by use of theterminology 324. The semantic description 332 is then returned alongwith the resource properties document 330 to the client 302.

Alternatively, the RDF graph relating to the semantic description canalso be retrieved separately without need to retrieve the completeresource properties document, e.g. by use of a GetResourceProperty( )command querying the resource property containing the RDF graph.

The computer program product 318 extracts the semantic description 332from the resource properties document 330 and stores the correspondingRDF graph in the knowledge base 316. The RDF graph of the manageableresource 320 is then searched for OWL import statements. The RDF graphmight be formally realized as an OWL ontology. This allows OWL importstatements that reference the underlying ontology as provided by theontology service 322 which provides the context. Each found ontologythat is not already loaded in the knowledge base 316 has to be retrievedfrom the ontology service 332 that maintains and provides the ontology.This is realized through a message exchange pattern which might forexample be based on the HTTP protocol. Alternatively, the ontologyservice 322 could be realized as a web service. Here the ontology wouldbe retrieved with a web service/SOAP call.

Accordingly, in an alternate embodiment, aspects of the manageableresource 320 are described in the meta-data with the semanticannotations of SAWSLD and additional constructs. This approach requiresmore effort but it is also a possible implementation. The effort forgenerating the semantic description comprising the RDF graph relating tothe manageable resource 320 is then moved from the manageable resource320 to the client 302.

The WSDL document 326 is then enriched with model Reference attributesand precondition and effect elements as intended by SAWSDL. Additional,classification of the manageable resource 320 itself and the URI of theunderlying ontology might be specified in the WSDL document by properattributes. This is not covered by SAWSDL. This might be achieved by amodelReference attribute of the enclosing WSDL XML element. The XMLSchema document of the resource properties document 328 is also enrichedwith semantic annotations of SAWSDL. In this way, the resourceproperties are semantically described through modelReference attributesin their XML Schema declaration.

The client 302 retrieves then the WSDL document 326 and the XML schemadocument 328 from the manageable resource 320 with the message exchangepattern as specified in WS-MetadataExchange, thus by use of aGetMetadata( ) request and a corresponding response. Then, the client302 retrieves the whole resource properties document 330 with theGetResourcePropertyDocument( ) request (the document 330 does in thiscase not include the semantic description 330!). The manageable resourcegenerates the resource properties document 330 at the time of therequest and returns the corresponding response. Then, the computerprogram product 318 evaluates all three documents and generates the RDFgraph based on the semantic annotations and the resource properties.This results in an RDF graph that semantically describes the MRidentical to the RDF graph that is generated by MR in the firstapproach. Finally, the client adds the generated RDF graph to theknowledge base 316.

The knowledge base 316 is then searched for unsatisfied OWL importstatements, and the corresponding ontology's are retrieved from theontology service 322 and finally the reasoner is invoked as describedabove.

FIG. 4 is a block diagram of a further application domain 400. Theapplication domain 400 comprises a data processing system 402, anontology service 403, and an IT infrastructure 404. The data processingsystem 402 provides stateful web services, for example for a requestingclient, in form of a first manageable resource 406 and in form of asecond manageable resource 408. The IT infrastructure 404 comprises afirst resource 410 and a second resource 412. The first manageableresource 406 is associated with the first resource 410 and the secondmanageable resource 412 relates to the second manageable resource 408.

The ontology service 403 provides an ontology 424 containing in itsterminology 426 a class instance each type of manageable resources ofthe domain 400 and rules 428 for operations. The first manageableresource is associated with a plurality of aspects that can be describedsemantically, for example by use of RDF statements. The first manageableresource 406 is of a certain type 414. The type 414 can be modeled as aclass of the ontology 424 which must be provided for the applicationdomain 400 by the ontology service 403. The first manageable resource406 is further associated with resource properties 416. The resourceproperties 416 are used to describe the characteristics and the currentstate of the first manageable resource 406.

The resource properties 406 relate to values of resource properties 418.The values of resource properties 418 contain data-by-value and can bemodeled as OWL datatype properties that contain literal data. The valuesof the resource properties can furthermore be modeled by aclassification mechanism which is called value partitioning. Here, a setof subclasses provided by the terminology 426 represents the disjointpartitions of the value space. The value is classified in a way so thatit is an instance of exactly one of the value partition subclasses.

The resource properties 416 also relate to relationships 420. Therelationships 420, realized for example in form of WSDM relationships,can be regarded as the special kind of resource property that comprisesendpoint references to other resources as data-by-reference. Thus, arelationship of the relationships 420 could specify an endpointreference to the second resource 412, whereas the values of resourceproperties 418 exclusively relate to the first resource 410 with whichthe first manageable resource 406 is associated with. The relationships420 can be modeled by OWL object properties that reference to the otherresources, for example to the second resource 412 as mentioned before.

Another aspect which can be modeled semantically relates to operations422 that are provided by the first manageable resource 406. Theoperations 422 can be modeled by the terminology 426. Each rule of therules 428 provided by the ontology 424 comprises two parts, theso-called premises, head or precondition and the so-called conclusion,body or effect. The building blocks for the rules are terms of triplepatterns that may contain variables. By variable binding, RDF statementscan be matched. If the premise is satisfied by the current content ofthe knowledge base, the operation is applicable. In this case, theeffect modifies the content of the knowledge base in a way, so that itreflects the outcome of the operations execution. The description formatfor the operations preconditions and effects is seamlessly integrated inthe RDF graph as semantic description format for the manageable resourcein this way.

The first manageable resource 406 might for example represent a computersystem. Thus, the first resource 410 of the IT infrastructure 404relates to the computer system. Its resource properties document mightthen contain a resource property named CPU temperature that has thevalue 84.42 and a relationship ‘connected to’ that contains an endpointreference to some switch that might correspond to the second resource412. Additionally, it provides an operation called ‘throttle clockspeed’. The understanding of the implied meaning in the names for thefirst manageable resource and its resource properties relies onadditional knowledge in form of common sense and is still vague even forhumans. As example, the question could be posed if the unit of theformer resource property is Celsius or Fahrenheit? In order to makeassertions about the semantics, the meaning of the first manageableresource 406 is expressed as a reference to an OWL class ‘computersystem’ to state that this resource is of type computer system. Themeaning of the resource property ‘CPU temperature’ is described with areference to an OWL datatype property named ‘CPU temperature’. The valueis extended by a classification like ‘critical’ that provides thesemantic behind the floating point number which is by itselfmeaningless. The semantic of the ‘connected to’ property is expressed byan OWL object property named ‘connected to’ that references somehow tothe switch corresponding to the second resource 412.

Finally, the ‘throttle clock speed’ operation is associated with aneffect that the CPU temperature will decrease. All semantic aspects, inthis case the class ‘computer system’, the resource properties ‘CPUtemperature’ and ‘connected to’, the operation ‘throttle clock speed’,as well as the classification of the values, are defined in an ontologywhich also contains information about how these aspects are related toeach other and represent the applications domain model. A requestingclient that uses the ontology or more particularly the terminologyprovided by the ontology as vocabulary to represent the state of thecomputer system can exploit the ontology to operate on the knowledge ofa semantic, logic level. According to this scenario, it would be able torealize the critical situation and realize that ‘throttle clock speed’is an operation to counteract the critical situation. In particular thiscan be accomplished without extra application code, only throughexploitation of the offered knowledge in the proper representationformat.

FIG. 5 shows a flow diagram illustrating basic steps performed by amethod of generating a machine-processable semantic description of amanageable resource of an application domain. This flow diagramillustrates in particular the steps performed by a client that generatesthe semantic description of the manageable resource by itself. The flowdiagram illustrates thus steps of the method in accordance with theinvention described above with reference to FIG. 3 as alternativeapproach.

According to step 500 of the method in accordance with the invention,meta-data annotations are provided in the WSDL document and the XMLschema document of the resource properties document of the manageableresource. According to step 502, the client retrieves the WSDL documentand the XML schema document of the resource properties document.According to step 504, the client furthermore retrieves the resourceproperties document from the manageable resource which does not includea semantic description of aspects of the manageable resource and whichis generated by the manageable resource in response to the client'srequest.

The client, subsequently, evaluates the XML schema document of theresource properties document, the WSDL document and the resourceproperties document and generates according to step 506 the RDF graph ofthe manageable resource by use of the semantic annotations in the twometa-data documents and the actual resource properties as provided bythe resource properties document. The generated RDF graph comprises aset of RDF statements that describe semantically aspects of themanageable resource. The client searches according to step 506 aknowledge base that provides the ontology of the application domain forunsatisfied OWL import statements in the RDF graph and retrieves missingparts of the ontology that relate to the unsatisfied OWL importstatements from the ontology according to step 510. Table 1, belowprovides a list of reference numerals for this, as way of example

TABLE 1 List of Reference Numerals 100 Application domain 102 Client 104Data processing system 106 IT infrastructure 108 Microprocessor 110Storage 112 Operating system 114 Microprocessor 116 Storage 118Operating system 120 Resource 122 Network connection 124 Networkconnection 126 Manageable resource 128 Ontology 130 Terminology 132 Setof aspects 134 Request 136 Semantic description 138 Rules 140 Computerprogram product 142 Knowledge base 144 Reasoner 300 Application domain302 Client 304 Data processing system 306 Microprocessor 308 Storage 310Microprocessor 312 Storage 314 Operating system 316 Knowlegde base 318Computer program product 319 Reasoner 320 Manageable resource 322Ontology service 324 Terminology 325 Rules 326 WSDL document 328 XMLschema document 330 Resource properties document 332 Semanticdescription 334 RDF statements 400 Application domain 402 Dataprocessing system 403 Ontology service 404 IT infrastructure 406 Firstmanageable resource 408 Second manageable resource 410 First resource412 Second resource 414 Type of manageable resource 416 Resourceproperties 418 Values of resource properties 420 Relationships 422Operations 424 Ontology 426 Terminology 428 Rules

While the preferred embodiment to the invention has been described, itwill be understood that those skilled in the art, both now and in thefuture, may make various improvements and enhancements which fall withinthe scope of the claims which follow. These claims should be construedto maintain the proper protection for the invention first described.

1. A method for resource management comprising the steps of: generatinga machine-processable semantic description for a first manageableresource of an application domain, wherein the first manageable resourceis characterized by a set of aspects; providing an ontology (128) forthe application domain, wherein the ontology provides a terminology(130) and rules (138) for describing the set of aspects of the firstmanageable resource of the application domain in a semantic way; andgenerating the semantic description of the first manageable resourcecompliant to the terminology of the ontology to describe semanticallythe set of aspects.
 2. The method according to claim 1, wherein thefirst manageable resource is hosted by a data processing system, whereinthe data processing system is linked with a client and the semanticdescription is generated by the first manageable resource in response tothe reception of a request from the client, further comprising the stepof sending the semantic description from the data processing system overthe network to the client.
 3. The method according to claim 2, whereinthe client further comprises a reasoner and a knowledge base and areasoner so that the client can stores the received semantic descriptionof the first manageable resource in the knowledge base; furthercomprising he steps of: the client searching the semantic descriptionfor import statements related to a part of the ontology; said ontologybeing created so that each part of the ontology relates to an importstatement that is retrieved on demand; storing in the reasoner anyrelated rules to the ontology such that the client can invoke thereasoner and the knowledge base in order to understanding andsubsequently process the semantic information for using the firstmanageable resource.
 4. The method according to claim 2, whereinontology is assumed in a program-code of the first manageable resourceand the first manageable resource generates its semantic description inthe terminology as specified in the ontology.
 5. The method according toclaim 1, wherein information received by the client includes: meta-dataannotations in a WSDL document and an XML schema document pertaining tothe resource properties further comprising the step of the clientgenerating the semantic description of the first manageable resourcecompliant to the terminology of the ontology from the received semanticinformation by using the meta-data annotated WSDL document and themeta-data annotated XML schema document.
 6. The method according toclaim 5, wherein the semantic information is comprised in form ofmeta-data annotations in the WSDL document and the XML schema documentof the resource properties document.
 7. The method according to claim 1,wherein the ontology comprises a class and a set of valued for the firstmanageable resource; said class being semantically described by use andsaid values relating to resource properties of the first manageableresource and classified by value partitioning.
 8. The method accordingto claim 7, wherein the resource property includes data-by-valueinformation associated with an OWL data type property provided by theontology.
 9. The method according to claim 8, wherein a resourceproperty comprises data describing relationship of the first manageableresource with a second manageable resource, wherein the secondmanageable resource is comprised in the application domain and saidrelationship is provided by the ontology with an OWL object propertythat provides semantic meaning for the relationship.
 10. The methodaccording to claim 1, wherein the operations for the first manageableresource is provided by a set represented by at least one rule, saidrule corresponding to each operation and providing meaning by specifyinga set of terms for preconditions and effects.
 11. The method accordingto claim 10; wherein the ontology comprises the terminology andadditional rules and the terminology is specified by use of an OWL Webontology Language (OWL).
 12. The method according to claim 11, whereinthe type of the first manageable resource is represented by an OWL classand each resource property contains literal data as represented by anOWL datatype property and each resource property is represented by anOWL object property.
 13. The method according to claim 12, wherein thetype of the first manageable resource is described as an RDF statementfurther comprising a predicate and an object; said predicate being andRDF type while the object is an URIref.
 14. The method according to anyone of the claim 13, wherein a rule comprises preconditions and effects;said preconditions and effects being further described by triplepatterns having the same structure as RDF statements and said triplepatterns also containing URIrefs or variables that can be used asplaceholders that can be bound by the reasoner.
 15. The method accordingto claim 14, wherein the set of aspects is described by use of a set ofRDF statements; said RDF statements building upon the terminology of theontology.
 16. The method according to claim 15, further comprising thesteps of: generating a semantic description for each manageable resourceof the application domain, wherein each semantic description comprises aset of RDF statements and the set of RDF statements semanticallydescribes the manageable resource itself including its actual state andits properties; integrating each semantic description into a semanticenvironment description.
 17. An apparatus for performing creatingapplication domains comprising: a data processing system hosting a firstmanageable resource; an ontology for the application domain, wherein theontology provides a terminology for describing a set of aspects of thefirst manageable resource of the application domain in a semantic way;means for generating a machine-processable semantic description of thefirst manageable resource, wherein the semantic description semanticallydescribes the first manageable resource itself and the set of aspectscompliant to the terminology of the ontology.
 18. The apparatusaccording to claim 17, further comprising a client, wherein the dataprocessing system is linked with the client and the semantic descriptionis generated by the first manageable resource in response to thereception of a request from the client; said data processing systembeing adapted to send the semantic description to the client.
 19. Theapparatus according to claim 18, wherein the client further comprises aknowledge base and a reasoner and the client is adapted to store thereceived semantic description of the first manageable resource in theknowledge base, and adapted to search the semantic description for a setof import statements relating to a part of the ontology.
 20. Theapparatus of claim 19, wherein each part of the ontology relating to animport statement is retrieved on demand and stored in the knowledgebase, and rules relating to the ontology are stored in the reasoner, andthe client is adapted to invoke the reasoner to perform interference onand processing of the ontology comprised in the knowledge base forunderstanding the semantic information of the first manageable resourceand for using the first manageable resource.